Another government official (at the federal level) has similarly noted that:
“The factors leading to the postmodern era seem to be the consequences of both the community as a whole and its members individually striving to meet higher order needs in a way that is analogous to development on the Maslow hierarchy. The differences between community and individual worker demands on the organization produce significant static that is much more pronounced than it was when community and local needs were at a lower level.
As the community matures, organizations must continue to meet the lower level needs they were formed to satisfy while attempting to meet emerging higher ones. For example, the petroleum products industry must continue to extract and deliver oil to its customers but must also insure a clean environment. At the same time that the community is imposing new demands, the workforce is making its own new higher order demands. Employees, while still looking to the organization for satisfaction of their basic needs through salaries also look to the organization for success, prestige and the development of their full potentialities.
Organizations survive only as long as they continue contributing to community purpose and providing employees the opportunity to satisfy their predominate needs. This becomes complicated as both the community and the organization’s members move toward higher level needs. For example, the military must accomplish a low level need, national defense, through a workforce that demands satisfaction of increasingly higher level needs.”
The commitment to learning and the investment in education reveal another important dimension of the postmodern era that we are now entering. It is an era that demands more of its workers than at any time in the past. And its organizations are willing to invest in the future of its employees to help them meet these demands.
Commitment to Continuity: The New Ethics of the Workplace
A problem is encountered, however, when an organization makes this investment. How does the organization ensure that the employee will be around after the investment in learning and education has been made? Thus, while the new knowledge worker often exhibits little sense of loyalty for the organization in which she works, there is a strong need for organizations to somehow retain their knowledgeable and skillful workers and to keep these workers up-to-date.
First, let’s briefly consider the nature of the new demands being made on the postmodern worker. As Peter Drucker noted in his identification of 21st Century challenges, the focus must be placed in the new century on productivity of workers rather than on low labor costs: “low labor costs no longer give enough of a cost advantage to offset low labor productivity.”[xliv] Furthermore, the future of productivity lies with the knowledge worker: “[t]he central challenge will be to make knowledge workers productive. . . . It is on their productivity, above all, that the future prosperity and indeed the future survival of the developed economies will increasingly depend.”[xlv] High levels of productivity, in turn, depend on the ongoing commitments to learning and education. These commitments, in turn, require low turnover rates. Thus, we face a major new leadership challenge: how do leaders build commitment to continuity in their organizations?
There are many examples in contemporary organizations of successful attempts to build continuity. High quality companies such as UPS can brag about an employee retention rate of more than 90% and can count on employee tenure spanning many decades.[xlvi] At the heart of the matter seems to be the lingering prevalence of premodern and modern values in the postmodern workplace. For instance, in Fortune’s 1999 survey of “The 100 Best Companies to Work for In America,” compensation remains a prominent variable.[xlvii] Furthermore, “while conventional wisdom holds that job security is a thing of the past, it’s a recurring perk among the 100 Best Companies. More than a third of them are whispering that employment is for keeps.”[xlviii] Three of the 100 best companies have formal no-layoff policies, while another 37 informally maintain such policies and seventy-four have never had a mass layoff.[xlix]
At the heart of the matter may be not just a concern for low employee turnover and its impact on productivity and the bottom line, but a parallel concern for the welfare of the knowledge worker herself. Without some sense of continuity and a commitment of the organization to the welfare and fulfillment of its employees and to some greater good or value, members of an organization are left standing on the edge of the postmodern world, viewing the blank or hazy space in front of them as an abyss. Robert Nelson suggests that economic development has religious underpinnings and that postmodern organizations must catch the “moral imagination” of its employees—a decidedly premodern notion:[l]
“Tremendous material progress did take place [during the modern era], lifting most of the human race far above the subsistence level where it had stagnated throughout most of human history. But material progress didn’t bring hoped-for spiritual progress. It brought the Holocaust and conspicuous consumption and wars instead. . . Good-bye, then, to the old idea of progress as a universally accepted goal. . . . [In 19th century America] progress was valued not for its own sake or because it would put more meat on people’s tables, but because it would bring about spiritual salvation. . . .
The problem proponents of the free market face today is this: how to bring capitalism back into harmony with these deeply embedded religious ideals. . . . So capitalism needs new moral arguments and spiritual dimensions if it is to endure; efficiency is no longer defense enough. This is more a task for the theologian than for the economists. If no such spiritual endorsement is forthcoming, capitalism could end up winning the war with communism, but losing the peace.”
I would disagree about the exclusion of economists in the dialogue regarding the new corporate values—since in the postmodern world all disciplines must be brought to bear upon the complex and fragmented problems being faced. I would agree, however, that capitalism and free market economies has been shown to be a relatively successful mechanism for generating economic growth and stability, but has not been very successful in engendering a sense of purpose or commitment among postmodern workers—or leaders.
